Facial expressions change the behavior of an observer interacting with the person, and if American Sign Language (ASL) linguistic facial expressions are misidentified as expressions of emotion, this could produce an unwanted response and lead to severe miscommunication. Currently, facial expression recognition technology is limited to identifying emotional expressions, and there is no broadly available tool for identifying ASL linguistic expressions.
Hearing observers, as well as facial expression recognition algorithms that are trained on hearing people, may not only fail to identify unfamiliar facial expressions, but will misinterpret ASL grammatical facial expressions as emotions. Therefore, there is a need for accurate recognition of ASL linguistic markers.